The collapse into spite and bullying is symptomatic of the party’s disaffection from its working class base

Has there ever been a stranger political occasion than Tuesday night’s marathon meeting of Labour’s national executive committee? In an abridged version, the events of those six hours may one day make a good play, awash not just with division and bitterness, but plenty of bathos – from the moment when “the office took a delivery of four crates of sandwiches”, to the aftermath when, in tribute to her leader’s solidarity with the downtrodden, a jubilant member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Westminster team tweeted a picture of two bottles of House of Commons champagne, with the simple caption, “Sweet”. Inside an hour, she had deleted it. Funny, that.